Reading Response: Becoming Members of a Gendered Society

I’m doing a re-read and some minor editing on each of these, but I’m kinda surprised by how few changes I’m making. Some pronoun adjustments for clarity here and there, mostly. Lots of cringing at wayword sentence structure, but oh well. Practice practice. The original here was a trans author with a beef against gender roles. (Which, duh, but this was an intro class. I was surrounded by children.)

Processing Becoming, there are three elements that stand out for exploration. First and foremost is my inability to have a personal grasp of much of what the author is describing. That description is clear and eloquent, and not difficult to understand. Some parallel experiences can be found; I can see evidence of that conditioning in myself when thinking of “role models” whose characteristics or mannerisms line up with my own image of myself. They are all men. Beyond that however, the connection becomes far less personal. In an irony of circumstance, my being a white male means I must acknowledge a level of privilege that has granted some immunity from conforming pressures. In our American society, white males are the default template for how one “should” be. Conforming to my own image of myself had to have been an easier experience than having to conform to someone else’s idea of myself.

The other side of the same subject is the author’s perspective, our second element. Née Holly, Aaron Devore seemingly expresses some level of his own personal experience in his writing. While discussing the characteristics of femininity and masculinity, his framing of each is particular. Femininity in his view starts with a want for male attention. “Warm and continued relations with men and an interest in maternity require that females be heterosexually oriented,” (476, all emphases added) from which male-pleasing feminine characteristics arise. “Masculinity,” on the other hand, “can be demonstrated through a wide variety of cues.” (477) While he later ascribes some degree of requirement to characteristics like emotional durability, the application of male choice to the genesis of both genders may have been influenced by the author’s discontent with being female.

This is not a flaw in the presentation, but I have to wonder if the emphasis would be the same from an author with a more consistent(?) experience in living. There are pressures in learning gender roles to be sure; some rules you simply follow. As I mentioned, all of my own role models are men. But there has remained choice along the way. Andy Griffith was clearly the town Sheriff, but even Don Knotts got a heroic turn saving our fleet from German U-boats. Masculinity thus covers a broad range, which has helped to keep me from being hemmed in by expectation. Could there have been a similar range within femininity that was occluded by the author’s personal perspective or preference?

The final element is a single sentence midway through the text. Whereas much of the piece is setting factual pieces in their necessary places to serve the argument being made, here a stray conclusion has been left to founder. “Thus it seems likely,” looking at some turnabouts in gender behaviors, “that many aspects of masculinity and femininity are the result, rather than the cause, of status inequalities.” (475) Unfortunately the end of that sentence was the end of the thought. To a certain extent this is understandable; a classist deconstruction would have been a tangent that could have clouded his male/female binary with ambiguity. However superficially, Devore’s argument of gender as a social construct is simple to grasp. The interplay of those constructs with those of class is one that sounds very interesting, but was left largely unexplored here.